Google Chrome Checkboxes, Radio Boxes Disappear? Here’s a Fix

I’ve had disappearing checkboxes all over the place with Google Chrome’s browser. I don’t use the beta version – just the regular, supposedly stable version.

It isn’t stable – the damn buttons are gone about every 30 minutes for me. They come back sometimes after I close the browser and re-start. Sometimes not. They come back after a reboot – I think always- at least for a short time.

Today I looked up again for answers.

I found one – not sure how long it works for – but, it’s better than putting a fish through your screen.

Using windows – right click your taskbar at the bottom and choose “properties”.

When another window opens – click OK at the bottom.

That’s it. You might need to refresh your page, you might not – the buttons might just show up like magic – same as they disappeared.

I love Google Chrome for nearly EVERYTHING compared to Firefox… it is superfast and works with all sorts of things that FireFox and Opera choke on.

As I type this in WordPress I realize my fricking checkboxes are gone again on the right side column where I need to choose a category for this article.

Fuckme Chrome – Google – fix this mess, please…

Ok, still having problems – and the google rep doesn’t know what the hell to do either – calls it “flaky”. Yeah, no shit – I’m reverting to FireFox browser until Google gets Chrome’s shit straight. Ridiculous a hundred billion dollar company can’t get things to work like Mozilla’s firefox can.

Author: Vern

I'm an American expat living in Thailand. I like to write informative pieces about life in, living in Thailand, including topics like: Thai People, Thai Culture, Nightlife, Technology, and I have published a lot of photographs, videos, and even books on Thailand that you can find at ThailandeBooks.com. There are many photographs of Thailand here - feel free to share with attribution (a link back to the home page).
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“Bizarre”… the right word indeed!
Couldn’t find much about it anywhere else, so thanks for providing these “workarounds”. It was so annoying, and by the way, bug of radio boxes and check boxes is still present in Google Chrome v 25.0.1364.160 m. I’m using XP SP3.

Chrome has a lot of bugs. Apparently in large part because the Webkit open source framework that Apple created for Safari, and that Chrome modified by creating a (much better) JavaScript engine for, is buggy.

The same disappearing checkbox behavior has been in both going back a ways. (Although it is currently so bad in my setup that it’s making Chrome just about unusable.

Here’s a ‘trick’ that works pretty much every time — but may only work for a few minutes.

Right click a web page element in Chrome and click Inspect Element. The lower half of the Chrome screen will disappear and a complex set of debugging style windows will appear. You can immediately close that and the checkboxes should have reappeared.

Keep in mind that is is possible to CHECK ‘invisible’ checkboxes if you tab to them and hit the spacebar. In complex form interfaces tabbing and using the spacebar for checkmarking is common among power users…

But the incompetence of Chrome/Webkit developers totally messes that up.

It’s a striking lapse — but it’s far from the only one in Chrome.

Google seems to have this notion that woefully buggy is “good enough” for their apps — I’ve been around and around with several issues in Chrome. (I’m a web developer and I have to use all the major browsers for testing.) And Google just seems to be too big and disorganized to “care” — even though they seem to pour an enormaous amount of effort into promoting Chrome.

It’s a bizarre and troubling continuing culture of incompetence from a company I used to really love.

Thanks for the “fix”, it worked for me. Programmers (or “Software Engineers” in the current parlance) are not smart enough to understand the complexities of their code (I was about the use “design” in place of “code”, but realized my error). Hence, the unbelievable crap that passes for software. Funny, in a sad way….